I can't believe this brief biography neglected to mention Naven, along with Balinese Character his most respected and widely known work. Based on the same body of research as the Mead co-authorship, here Bateson first focuses on the schismogenic, or rift-forming, types of relationships people tend to enter into. It's really useful to have a game theory background when looking at this stuff, to see how something as seemingly abstract as the Prisoner's Dilemma can have immediate and concrete applications in human affairs in everything from domestic spats to the international nuclear arms race. Bateson believed that von Neuman's game theory would give the same scientific rigour to the anthropological sciences that Newton's concept of an idealized point weight did to the physical sciences.

I highly recommend Mind and Nature as it is a powerful introduction to Bateson's application of cybernetics and information theory to anthropology. If you've had a semester of psychology nothing in it should prove too difficult, although it's frustrating because you can't really see where he's going with all these separate threads until the last third or so of the book when he finally weaves them all together into an elegant tapestry.

His final work, the posthumous collection A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind edited by Rodney E. Donaldson is sadly out of print. This work is staggering in it's range and complexity; I've had to struggle to understand every part I undertook to read, even having to abandon a few sections out of total confusion, but every section I ended up wading through rewarded me with a little satori insight into the nature of things, how it's all strung together. I don't think anybody else, save possibly Teilhard deChardin, has done more to bring together the human/cultural/spiritual and mechanistic/scientificworldviews. In the interest of generating interest in his final book (without a clamor heard by the publishers, it'll never come back into print), I've decided to list the table of contents, to give a better idea of it's scope.

8. The New Conceptual Frames for Behavioral Research
9. Cultural Problems Posed by a Study of Schizophrenic Process
10. A Social Scientist Views the Emotions
11. The Message of Reinforcement
12. The Double-Bind Theory -- Misunderstood?
13. The Growth of Paradigms for Psychiatry

14. Mind/Environment
15. The Thing of It Is
16. A Formal Approach to Explicit, Implicit, and Embodied Ideas, and to Their Forms of Interaction
17. The Birth of a Matrix, or Double Bind and Epistemology
18. This Normative Natural History Called Epistemology
19. Our Own Metaphor: Nine Years After
20. The Science of Knowing
21. Men Are Grass: Metaphor and the World of Mental Process

One final note: you might think, especially upon reading the titles to chapters 9 and 13, above, that Bateson would offer a bridge between the humanistic and behavioristic schools of psychology. Alas, this is not so; in fact, Bateson could be a bit of a bastard at times. I cite as evidence his barking attitude towards a seminal humanistic psychologist, a live debate that is transcribed in Carl Rogers: Dialogues. (Amusingly enough, the debate itself constitutes an excellent example of complementary schismogenesis, each side pushing the other apart into further extremes in a sort of 'verbal arms race', a trap which Bateson should have been all-too-wary of falling into.) In the spirit of "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!" I don't think it really matters: we don't need to engage in fawning idolatry or hero-worship of any kind. We are all tentatively groping towards the "truth" (whatever that may be, as ultimately unknowable as it may be), and seeing our best minds occasionally reduced to bickering or partisan politics can have a humbling effect on us, a powerful underscoring of the need for a concilliatory approach between the sciences and humanities.

(Yes, this did appear on a website somewhere. But it was mine, so it's not really stealing!)